At this there were angry shouts from all over the theatre:
“What is the money to do with it?”
“We don’t want to see the wretched play again.”
“How is her health?”
“Tell us how she is.”
Some one else came out from behind the curtain and asked:
“Is there a doctor here?”
A young woman at once came up. But the audience left its seat and crowded forward towards the curtain asking angrily how the actress was. The actress was not a particular favourite. But the people cared, and what is more, they had been made ashamed by the callous but sincere statement of the management on the more important aspect of the interruption of the programme. Life on the stage and life, how wide apart!
Intoxication through alcohol has disappeared, and with it a certain amount of abnormal and bestial vice, but the world remains as evil and human.
Drink, as the porter in Macbeth said, is the great equivocator, it sets on and sets off, persuades and then disheartens. The removal of drink has left men more restless—at least in the towns. Probably in the village the removal of all kinds of drink has been an unmixed blessing. But in the towns the roving eye of man has roved further. It is impossible to clear up the immorality of the towns by Imperial ukase. The Russian boy of the town is born into a world of more temptations and risks than the English boy. A great deal of disclosed Russian genius must be poisoned between the ages of twelve and twenty by certain social conditions which no one in Russia seems capable of making an effort to clear up. The Russian town of to-day is no doubt none too easy for the young woman, and it seems a sort of hell for the young man, a long burning and the worm which dieth not. Health, health, how to obtain conditions of health, that is the problem!